A bunch of folks from tretton37 went on an evening walk after work, on Järvafältet.

On the plus side: going for a nature walk after work was very relaxing. We saw the hairy cows at Väsby gård, and got some lovely evening light. And the company was good.

On the minus side: I was tired and starving when I finally got home, a good hour and a half later than I had expected.

What I thought would happen is that we meet up at 17 at Akalla, walk 4.5 km, and end up at Häggvik from where I can take the train or the bus home. Home by 19.

What I didn’t take into account was, firstly, that those 4.5 km didn’t start at Akalla station – we first had a 15-minute walk to the starting point of the hike. And the hike itself was maybe more like 6 km rather than 4.5. And there would be fika afterwards. And the hike didn’t actually end at Häggvik station, but only in its general vicinity (another 25-minute walk).

Adrian is doing homework; I am keeping him company.

He has struggled in the past with setting aside sufficient time for doing his homework, and has repeatedly ended up leaving way too much work for the last minute. He’s also been rather resistant to any kinds of suggestions for various alternative ways to schedule time for homework. After school he wants to rest; weekends he wants to game with his friends. But now he’s found a new routine, which – most importantly – involves planning ahead and figuring out how much time he will likely need to spend on homework, and making time for it. It’s way later in the evening than I would ever choose for myself, but whatever works for him!

He is much more productive and happier when he has study company. (So is Ingrid, for that matter.) I get to practice French vocabulary, learn obscure Estonian spelling rules that I had no idea about (the spelling just is that way in my head, without any rules) and hear about different types of sports injuries and how to treat them.

Meanwhile I am working on my black and white embroidery exercises. I added a layer of watered-down acrylic paint on the embroidery that wasn’t quite black enough, and I’m doing the groundwork for the next one by sponge-painting a newsprint-like pattern.

We visited my sister-in-law at her cottage. Ingrid drove us all the way there, over 100 km through very varied conditions: city traffic, large roundabouts, long stretches of busy motorway, and then ever smaller country lanes. Along the way she got to practise all kinds of skills, from cruise control, to overtaking lorries, to making space for vehicles on on-ramps.

For all practical purposes, she can drive. Under supervision, for now, because she sometimes forgets some details. But when she took a driving lesson earlier this week to get a gauge on her skills, she came home dejected and stressed out – the teacher made her feel like she knew nothing. They are incredibly nit-picky about things such as the timing of gear changes, how aggressively to accelerate when taking off after a traffic light, etc. If I had to take a driving test today, I would certainly fail.

Still traipsing through Stockholm for job interviews.

Even though I don’t have anything signed yet, today I gave notice to quit my job at tretton37. Three months’ notice period means I will leave by the end of the year.

I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my last exercise for the black and white embroidery course. I touched up the shapes to make the proportions better, and that helped. The difference is perhaps subtle in a photo but obvious when I hold the piece in front of me.

The surfaces are still not as black as I would like. I preferred the appliqué look with its proper, deep black. But the teacher argued that embroidery is about stitches, and a stitched surface has more character than plain appliqué, and I can see the point. Her suggestion was to paint the surface where I want it fully black.

Had I planned for this, I could have painted those parts of the fabric before embroidering. Now I’ll have to do it after. I don’t have black fabric paint but I do have black acrylic. I’m now experimenting with watered-down acrylic paint to see how it affects the look and feel of the fabric.

Speaking of paint, our second exercise is to paint on newsprint with Indian ink and use that as a starting point for our embroidery design. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with Indian ink. One immediate learning is just how much the brush matters for this. I had one broad, thick, stiff brush and one smaller one, much softer. The thick brush held on to the ink and gave me even, smooth strokes. The soft brush gave up most of its load of paint as soon as it met paper, then ran out of ink before I even finished the stroke, and the brushstrokes came out as blobs with tails. Both brushes are from the same main street hobby store, so I guess it’s not even a matter of quality but just type of brush.

All my tights came out from the washing machine covered in specks of white lint. Some worse than others; this pair of black leggings looked the worst. I guess someone forgot to empty their pockets. Luckily I only this particular pair and its twin at home.

A lint roller didn’t help at all, but the specks were easy to loosen with my fingernails.

I wouldn’t want to wear the leggings like this, but they did look rather pretty, I thought.

This cardigan is accumulating more and more darned patches. I wear it a few times, and then find another threadbare patch that needs some TLC. They’re very unevenly distributed, and with no thought to what would look good – they just go where the holes are appearing. I’m thinking that maybe I should add more patches elsewhere, not so much to strengthen the fabric but to make it look more cohesive. I have enough of that yarn for a heck of a lot of darning.

Adrian is now a mere 2 cm shy of Eric’s height. Given that he grew 10 cm in the past year and the same in the year before, he’s going to make that distance up soon.

I’m past the dead zone! It feels like I made more progress today, measured in volume of soil dug through, than in the past three weekends all together. No more scraping soil one fingers-breadth at a time. Now I’m cutting off entire chunks.

The soil here is like somewhat crumbly cheese: sticky and stable. Cut it, and it sticks to your tool, and what you cut off falls into a few pieces, but it can be handled in chunks.

The horrible soil was close to a place where there used to be a concrete sewer access. I’m guessing maybe the soil got compacted by heavy machinery when it was installed?

I have given up entirely on tretton37 – seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company doesn’t survive until the end of the year – so now I’m looking for a new employer. That means phone calls and meetings and interviews – and coding tasks. The first one I did was a small and simple one – I think I banged it out in an hour and a half. The other company I’m in serious discussions with has a bigger task, so basically I’m spending most of today working. I started after a leisurely Saturday breakfast and decided that I will stop when it’s time to cook dinner, and whatever is left undone at that point can stay that way.

It’s a serious time investment, and I might not be willing to do this if I was interviewing with more companies. But I’ve only got three right now that I’m interested in, so I can invest a bit more in each one. And I actually prefer this to the other coding task, which was almost too simple, and for which the feedback I got was roughly “this looks really great!” and that was that. Makes me suspicious. Are they desperate? If my code – admittedly nice but nothing earth-shattering – looked so great to them, what kind of low expectations did they have? They say they’re selective but this coding task wouldn’t winnow out many candidates.

I want to be challenged, and I want colleagues who will challenge me.